Return of the links

For a while, every Friday I used to post a collection of links here – just fun stuff really, procrastinatory bits and pieces that might help pass the time on a boring Friday afternoon while waiting for the weekend. I think an especially busy few months put paid to that routine, though.

Later, posting a weekly round-up of interesting Twitter stories seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t. It took only a couple of weeks to discover that reading numerous stories about Twitter every week, most of which you’ve in fact found on Twitter, very quickly starts to feel like voluntarily subjecting oneself to an especially noisy echo-chamber; i.e. not an entirely rational thing to commit to.

But ideally there would be at least one post on here each week, and finding something to write about on a weekly basis can be difficult. It’s not that there aren’t all kinds of things going on in the world of social media, the internet, technology, etc. – if anything, there’s too much to keep track of. The real problem is finding an item that either hasn’t already been covered by those big blogs that everyone already reads, or has been covered but to which I can still add a new angle (or at least an angle that I haven’t already read somewhere else).

I suppose, I could just summarise whatever seems most important or interesting that week, but frankly that would just feel redundant – not a great motivation to write; or to read.

There’s no reason, however, why I shouldn’t do something more curatorial. So, the solution, revive the Friday links post, but in a slightly more structured and focussed form – and make it a Friday or Saturday post, to allow for any busy Fridays. There’ll still be other posts too, of course.

One final reason to revive it: I don’t know about anyone else, but I haven’t been keeping up with The Guardian’s Technology section now that it’s no longer part of the print edition: what if part of this proposed Friday/Saturday links post were to be devoted to highlighting some of its more interesting or surprising stories each week? Problem solved.

As for what the rest of the links might be devoted to; well, I’m sure I’ll have finalised the categories by Friday.